Posts Tagged «civilization»

The Global Positioning System, or GPS, has — somewhat surprisingly — found itself at the heart of modern civilization. There is no doubt that the ubiquity of GPS across all areas of civilian, commercial, and scientific endeavor has improved the quality of life for billions of people. It is a little bit scary, then, that GPS can very easily be jammed or disrupted by terrorists or other nefarious actors. What are the alternatives? Do we have a backup?

This summer, the European Space Agency published data that suggested that the Earth’s magnetic field could flip — as in, the magnetic north pole becomes the magnetic south pole — in ‘a few thousand years.’ At the time, I figured there was no rush to write it up — after all, we might not even be living on Earth in a few thousand years. Now, however, new research published this week shows that the magnetic field might flip within our lifetime — so it’s probably something that we ought to talk about.

As the technology that underpins virtual reality develops and the experiences become increasingly more real, I’ve been pondering a particularly morbid thought: When will we have the first VR-induced death? Will a realistic rocket launcher blast in Team Fortress 2 or VR version of Silent Hill give you a heart attack? Will a a VR experience be so realistic that you get so swept up in the moment that you run into a wall or jump out a window?

With SpaceX now set to receive its $2.6 billion slice of the manned space travel pie, Elon Musk has sensed the time is right to set the Mars agenda. He argues that a colony on Mars would just be for thrills or exploration, but a necessary safeguard for human life at large.

Early Sunday morning, SpaceX mission CRS-4 lifted off from Cape Canaveral towards the International Space Station, carrying with it the first 3D printer that will operate in zero gravity. When the astronauts aboard the ISS use the 3D printer, they will become the first humans to ever manufacture goods away from planet Earth. It’s not quite the Moon- or Mars-based factory that we’ve always dreamed of, but it’s a very important first step towards manufacturing goods outside of Earth’s gravity, and thus the eventual colonization and industrialization of the Solar System.

While the world’s only major fusion power effort — ITER — continues to trundle along, with an eventual first-fusion date of 2027 at a cost of more than $20 billion to taxpayers, there’s a small lab in New Jersey that says it can produce fusion power within a year, with a total spend of just a few million dollars. To be honest it sounds too good to be true — but rest assured that Focus Fusion, at least to my eyes, is the real deal. This isn’t some kind of magical, inexplicable witchcraft like cold fusion: Focus Fusion appears to be based on cold, hard science. This could actually be it.

64 years after the father of computer science, Alan Turing, proposed a method of testing whether a machine has obtained human-level intelligence, a 13-year-old AI boy called Eugene Goostman has finally become the first artificial intelligence to pass the Turing Test. Don’t worry, though, sentient computers aren’t about to take over the world: The Turing Test is actually rather flawed, and doesn’t really measure an AI’s capability for intelligent thought.

Over the past few years, I’ve spent quite a lot of time discussing Google’s foray into non-search technologies: Wearable computing, robotics, home automation, indefinite life extension, green energy generation — you name it, if it’s a technology that even has the slightest chance of blossoming in the next decade or so, Google is all over it. Most observers have explained away these acquisitions and research efforts as having a tangential connection to Google’s primary product, search, but I would argue that there’s another possibility: Google is gearing up to become its own nation.

When a new kind of technology comes along, whether it’s something small like a computer chip or something huge like the World Wide Web, it nearly always follows the same path to mass adoption: Military, early adopters, and then games and sex. Virtual reality has passed the military stage, and is moving steadily through the early adoption stage. Next up: Virtual reality sex.

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